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Monthly Archives: August 2014

If you watched the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, you may remember that Bill Nye used tree ring evidence to support the idea that there was not a global flood 4,000 ago. He said that they found evidence of a tree that was dated by humans to be 9,500 years old.

Beside the fact that there’s a big difference between 10,000 and 5,000,000,000 (the supposed evolutionary age of the earth, a problem that wasn’t really addressed), he was playing on a childhood belief that there is only one tree ring per year on a tree.

A little research into the science of tree dating reveals that it is a well known fact that, sometimes, trees produce more rings than one in a year. I wouldn’t throw away your belief in a young earth based on Bill Nye’s arm chair analysis.

To learn a bit more about the assumptions that go into dating trees, see these articles:

Remember, evidence isn’t proof because scientists can be wrong. Even when something is likely to be true, it doesn’t mean that it is true. Sometimes, unlikely things happen. In this case, it wasn’t even unlikely. Sometimes, trees produce more that one ring a year, and scientists already know this.

The evidence for God’s existence is everywhere. The same evidence is used by both atheists and evolutionists. This evidence is found in biology, geology, chemistry, astronomy, paleontology, physics and everything else. The most obvious evidence for God’s existence is the Bible. It’s hard to top a written document that explains things, but somehow, this most obvious evidence, is often ignored. This demonstrates that the problem isn’t evidence, it’s how that evidence is being interpreted. Because evidence has to be interpreted, there is absolutely no way to do science without a faith. Allow me to restate that. If you must interpret scientific evidence, then your method of interpretation, or faith, is a prerequisite.

Let’s consider “faith” in “the law of cause and effect.” We must “believe” in the law of cause and effect, or doing experiments wouldn’t be possible. When we do an experiment, we naturally “believe” that the experiment is the cause and that the result is the effect. If we didn’t then we couldn’t do any science at all. We must also “believe” in the existence of “laws of nature.” Isn’t that what science discovers? If there were no laws in nature, why do science? Somehow, we “know” that nature has laws. We make these assumptions and these assumptions form our faith. The sum of all of the things we believe or “take for granted,” is what we call a “worldview.”

Requiring evidence for a worldview is not rational because your worldview tells you how to interpret evidence. The Bible provides us with a worldview. Requiring evidence for it would never prove it, because any evidence would simply be reinterpreted by the worldview of the person considering the evidence.

Did you know that there is a mathematical model for the geocentric (earth is the center instead of sun) view of the solar system? I am told it is possible to chart the movement of objects in the sky using this model with success. The model, however, is extremely complicated. If one insists on the fact that the earth is the center of the solar system, the evidence can be interpreted that way.

I am also told that at one time, Galileo tried to convince the skeptics of his day that the moon wasn’t a perfect sphere, as Aristotle had stated. He had them look into his telescope and see that the moon was covered with craters and valleys. They refused to believe their own eyes! They stated that there must be an invisible crystalline sphere that covered the moon, filling in its valleys and craters.

These examples demonstrate the limit of evidence. It cannot prove anything, ultimately. It can confirm a person’s ideas but it is amazingly inconclusive when faith is involved, and faith is always involved. Why couldn’t the earth be the center of the solar system? Why couldn’t there be an invisible crystalline sphere around the moon? Evidence alone won’t prove the point! If you try to live by evidence without faith, you will always be easily confused. I tend to believe the simplest answer, if God doesn’t say otherwise. The Bible tells us that God is a God of love and hides things for us to discover. It makes sense that God’s science would be fascinatingly simple.

The faith problem explains why so many evolutionists and atheists disregard the best evidence of God. They find ways, based on their faith, to disregard things, like the Bible. It is consistent with their faith to re-interpret evidence, but to so and then act like others shouldn’t, is very inconsistent. I find that, in general, evolutionists and atheists don’t actually want evidence for God or the Bible, they already have faith in something else that causes them to use the evidence the way that they want. They may think they are being “neutral,” even though that doesn’t exist, but they are merely holding to their worldview. If something disagrees with their worldview, they simply create a new possibility, based on the unknown, and reinterpret the evidence.

Bible believers actually have a more strict position. Unlike evolutionists, I can’t just make things up. God’s words are pretty clear and never change, and I have to stay consistent with them. It is true that when I don’t understand something I use conjecture, just like the evolutionists, but I try to stay within the confines of what God has said. I’m not asking evolutionists for evidence, though, because I am aware that the real issue is that evolutionists have an opposing faith.

I have a good reason to believe in God and science. Evolutionists and atheists don’t have a good reason to believe what they believe. The demand for evidence is just being used as a way to suppress the fact that what they believe doesn’t make sense. Take the “law of cause and effect” for instance. How can evolution explain the existence of a law like that? If things change randomly, what’s to stop the law of cause and effect from changing randomly? As far as I can tell, evolution doesn’t provide a rational framework for the existence of any law. In order for an evolutionist to believe in science at all, they must irrationally rely on biblical assumptions. The Bible says that the earth was created by a Person who never changes and makes laws. Because of that, I have a real reason to believe in science. Evolution, however, cannot rationally support the worldview that must be assumed in order for science to exist.